Archive for the 'Pet Shop Boys' Tag Under 'Soundcheck' Category

Tuesday began with news of a between-fests appearance from Pixies at Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown on April 17, and by afternoon we had learned that Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas had announced a Roxy gig for this Thursday night, April 10.

Both acts have been slated for what’s usually the most overflowing tent, Mojave. Black Francis & Co., who return to play Sept. 28 at the Hollywood Bowl with Gogol Bordello and Cat Power, are expected at 8:50 p.m. That's more or less against Foster the People on the main stage, Sleigh Bells at the Outdoor Theatre, Solange in Gobi and Fatboy Slim blowing up Sahara. Casablancas plays earlier in the day, at 5:05, overlapping with City and Colour on the main, the Head and the Heart on the second stage and Holy Ghost in Gobi.

As happens virtually every year, the schedule is rife with as many frustrating conflicts as brilliant plans.

There’s at least one thing most Coachella watchers will likely agree on: this 2014 lineup has no wow at all.

That’s a fairly bold statement to make, considering the opening-night main attraction for this year’s double-weekend spring festival in Indio is the first performance in more than a decade from OutKast. The celebrated hip-hop duo of Andre 3000 (above, center) and Big Boi largely disappeared from stages around the time their 2003 double-disc opus Speakerboxxx/The Love Below took home the Grammy for album of the year.

The other two headliners, Matthew Bellamy (left) and Muse in the middle and Win Butler (right) and Arcade Fire to close out the event, are hardly slouches – they’re among the most vibrant large-scale acts around. Plus, organizers at L.A. concert promoter Goldenvoice snagged the usual slew of rarities, from the long-awaited West Coast return of the Replacements and the desert debut of another important forebear, Bryan Ferry, to turns from Pet Shop Boys, the Afghan Whigs, Neutral Milk Hotel, even English punk novelty the Toy Dolls.

Certainly nothing to sniff at. But considering Arcade Fire’s booking was virtually a given (the Montreal band’s tour routing already revealed it was Indio-bound for the fourth time) and that the much-circulated rumor about OutKast’s reunion had all but been confirmed by Rolling Stone and the pair’s own Instagram photo, there isn’t really a big reveal in this roster that would cause many jaws to drop.

Who needs a new Daft Punk spectacle when there’s still so much to see from Pet Shop Boys?

While dance music devotees across the globe held out hope all spring and summer that the Frenchmen of “Get Lucky” fame would change their minds and suddenly surface with a multimillion-dollar mind-blower to shame all other post-rave pretenders to the throne, their forebears from across the English Channel spent that same period concocting and then touring a fresh dazzler that is undoubtedly as eye-grabbing as any Daft creation. Probably more hits in it, too.

The new PSB show, which squeezes 24 songs into 90 perfectly paced minutes that never lag from extended interludes or weak selections, ended what hopefully isn’t its only stateside run Saturday night at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium. It’s such a savvy advancement from the ever-fascinating duo of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe – a remarkable recasting of their sound and vision to suit these EDM-oversaturated times – that it merits restaging at festivals next year.

Given enthusiastic reactions I’ve heard from fellow concert junkies who make regular April sojourns to the desert, I’m far from the only one who thinks it would kill at Coachella. An even compacter version easily could be the most impactful set to hit the Sahara tent since Daft Punk in 2006. Definitely would have less stench of stunt than Madonna did that same year, and be more widely seen than LCD Soundsystem in 2007 (when James Murphy’s group drew poorly, unlike three years later). It also lacks the indulgence of Avicii’s ballyhooed blankness last year and is far more genuine and artful than Moby’s big nothing this year.

Talk about prolific: The English electro-pop forebears will release their 12th proper album – Electric, eight new ones plus a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Last to Die” – on July 15, less than a year after the long-running duo issued its somewhat mellower predecessor, Elysium.

That's swell news, but here's a better add-on: the ever-inventive performance artists (the man in the pointy hat is vocalist Neil Tennant at the London Olympics last summer) are touring here again, launching from Miami in mid-September.

Their first West Coast appearance since a September 2009 gig at the Greek comes at the tail-end of a stateside tour, Oct. 12 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Tickets, $49.50-$125.50, are on sale Friday at 10 a.m.

Palms, Fear, Mowgli’s and more: The Observatory has beefed up its roster considerably this week with a heaping handful of new gigs, including new group Palms, formed from members of Deftones (including vocalist Chino Moreno) and Isis. They play July 11, $18, not long after their self-titled debut drops on Mike Patton’s Ipecac Recordings on June 25. That one is on sale Friday at 10 a.m.

Gotye kicks off his Greek Theatre debut. Photo: Armando Brown, for the Register. Click the pic for more.

Eight months ago, when a creeping, bitterly heartbroken ditty called “Somebody That I Used to Know” arrived stateside, accompanied by millions upon millions of YouTube views for its painstaking stop-motion video, only Aussiephiles and in-the-know industry types had a clue about Gotye. His name was a tiny question mark for most when it appeared around that same time in small print on this year's Coachella poster.

What is a Gotye, even the hippest people wondered? How do you pronounce it, and is it contagious?

We found out soon enough. Gotye (“Go-tee-yay,” if you still haven't learned) is a Bruges-born, Melbourne-reared multi-instrumentalist wild about distilling nuanced pop gems out of electronic gadgets, like Thomas Dolby before him. His moniker is an approximation of the French equivalent for Walter (or Wouter, Mr. De Backer's proper name) and his music is indeed infectious – particularly The Hit That Must No Longer Be Named, seeing as that instantly appealing smash has become annoyingly omnipresent and hilariously parodied. Even toddlers can recognize it from just a few opening plinks.

By Easter it was inescapable, and come Coachella it stood out as the only song seemingly every type of attendee wanted to witness live during one weekend or the other. Not surprisingly, the festival came to a screeching halt when Gotye's set began each Sunday evening, massive throngs spilling out of the Mojave tent on all sides, most people unable to hear or see much of his set. That is, until everyone got what they wanted, and tens of thousands of people started caterwauling “SOME-BAH-DEEEEE!” loud enough to be detected from space. It was even more intense at the end of the chilly, misty first weekend, particularly when guest vocalist Kimbra strolled out from the wings to deliver her verse.

The long-awaited reunion of the Cars, one of the best and most popular bands of the new wave and early-MTV era, is finally creeping into view.

Hints of new music surfaced late last year, and now the first two songs from Move Like This, the group's first album in nearly 24 years, are starting to get noticed. The video for lead-off track "Blue Tip" (above) arrived in February, while the first single, "Sad Song" (which is anything but that), was released a month ago.

So far all indications are that the Cars have returned to what made them great in their heyday: chugging staccato guitar riffs, turbo-charged yet synthetically crisp drums, keyboard washes backing electro grooves (what we've heard of Greg Hawkes' keyboard parts evokes Devo, Pet Shop Boys and an obvious progeny, the Killers).

Lest there be any misunderstanding, it's worth reiterating that this is the real Cars, not that aberration the New Cars from 2006-07. That was a Todd Rundgren-led tribute devised to reap nostalgia money. This reunion, on the other hand, is legit: bassist and co-vocalist Benjamin Orr died of pancreatic cancer in 2000, but the remaining members -- guitarist/vocalist Ric Ocasek, lead guitarist Elliot Easton, Hawkes and drummer David Robinson -- comprise the rest of the original group that ran from 1976 to 1988.

To understand what a joyful revelation OMD was Friday night at the Music Box in Hollywood -- the English synth-pop outfit's first full-blown L.A. performance in nearly 23 years, since opening for Depeche Mode at the Rose Bowl in June '88 -- it would help to first recount its relatively rapid rise and fall stateside. And forgive the self-indulgence, but it's hard to do so impartially; I can't help but view it all through my own prism.

Though my headphones were clogged in the early '80s by unlikely complements of Iron Maiden and the Clash, Rush and the Ramones, I instantly loved most of the British synth groups that emerged during that era. In retrospect, New Order, mutating out of Joy Division following Ian Curtis' suicide, and the formative Depeche Mode seemed like future titans from the start, with Gary “Cars” Numan paving the way into the mainstream. But there were scores more inspired by Bowie, Eno and especially Kraftwerk that cropped up in 1980-83.

Yaz, former Depeche dude Vince Clarke's short-lived duo with Alison Moyet (known as Yazoo at home), was among the best overall, but plenty of other sullen-looking lads with nutty haircuts and Fairlight gear delivered albums that were deeper than any chart-invading MTV-amplified novelties suggested, from Soft Cell and the Human League to Thomas Dolby and A Flock of Seagulls, whose '82 debut is far better than that much-mocked totem “I Ran (So Far Away).” (For argument's sake, let's leave Duran Duran and ABC, estimable groups whose early albums are essentials, in the New Romantic subgenre with Spandau Ballet, since those groups' sounds quickly grew more guitar-oriented.)

Then there was Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, one of the daftest monikers in pop history, who sprang off the Wirral Peninsula, across the Mersey River from Liverpool.

They had no salable image to speak of -- apart from Dolby, they were the nerdiest of the bunch -- but they had a proto-electro feel that was fresh, lively, at times moodily dark like Side 2 of Low yet more often came laced with unabashedly cheerful melodies, even when the material was bittersweet.

September 29th, 2010, 1:42 am by BEN WENER, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

On Feb. 16, two days before she turned 77, the incomparable Yoko Ono, who by now has released nearly as many albums as her venerated late husband, served as both performer and honoree at a guest-heavy fête at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The event, dubbed We Are Plastic Ono Band and arranged under the musical direction of Ono and John Lennon's son, Sean Lennon, was a hot-ticket smash success in NYC, and it's about to have an L.A. encore, Friday and Saturday at the Orpheum Theatre, the opulent downtown venue that most people (apart from indie-music concert-goers) primarily know these days as the home of Hollywood Week on American Idol.

The roll call for this weekend's tributes has changed, but the caliber of artists who will salute four decades of music and performance art still speaks to Ono's enduringly daring and idiosyncratic style. Iggy Pop, Mike Watt of the Minutemen and Nels Cline of Wilco take part Friday, while Lady Gaga -- whose calculated outrageousness owes at least as much to Ono as it does Madonna -- will appear Saturday night, along with Moore and Gordon.

Appearing at both performances will be an array like you never see on the same stage: Perry Farrell, the RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, actors Carrie Fisher and Vincent Gallo, Pitchfork darling tUnE-yArDs, electronic music pioneer Haruomi Hosono of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the current, Japanese-rich incarnation of the Plastic Ono Band, led by Sean but also featuring avant-gardist Cornelius and Yuka Honda of the group Cibo Matto.

Day 2 of the third annual Outside Lands music festival began much like the first -- with a sun-smothering fog hovering overhead, the frigid wind whipping and swirling over the hilly, green grounds of San Francisco's historic Golden Gate Park. Attendees seemed happy, but slightly subdued.

Then something happened that changed the entire course of the festival's few remaining hours.

Just before a late-afternoon show from Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros that was assuredly one the fest's finest performances (and I dare say may have trumped the band's shining set at Coachella), the sun came out.

Now, it's a fact that sunlight provides natural energy. But the transformational change perceived here -- a swell of uninhibited excitement that suddenly flowed forth like hot magma from fans and artists alike -- made the sudden shift in weather, and the festival's titanic conclusion, seem nearly supernatural.

Magnetic Zeros leader Alex Ebert, for one, took the sun's appearance as his cue to leap down -- looking like a barefoot bohemian superhero -- from the 10-foot high Twin Peaks Stage, spending the entire first number, “40 Day Dream,” singing to and holding hands with fans from the barrier. Ebert is one of the most formidable frontmen in recent memory, but the talents of his multitudinous ensemble (particularly the soothing vocals of co-founding member Jade Castrinos) are just as integral to the band's momentous power, which erupted into a sea of unrestrained dancing during the set-closing hit single “Home.”

May 16th, 2010, 3:44 pm by GEORGE A. PAUL, FOR THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

When a-ha performed the propulsive, orchestral-tinged hit “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” during its encores at Club Nokia on Saturday night, a montage of old American movies and television shows was projected on a backdrop. Watching brief images from 1980s NBC staples like The Cosby Show and Miami Vice brought to mind how another network -- MTV -- played a central role in the Norwegian synth-pop trio's short-lived stateside success.

The cable channel put the groundbreaking 1985 music video for the buoyant single “Take on Me,” in which telegenic vocalist Morten Harket is part of a comic strip come to life, into heavy rotation. Pop radio followed suit. The track went to No. 1, propelled a-ha's debut album Hunting High and Low to platinum status, and resulted in a Grammy nomination for best new artist.

Yet, despite a shift into more rock-oriented terrain, 1986's Scoundrel Days was basically met with deaf ears here, and the group faded from view as fast as it arrived. In Europe and South America, however, it was a different story; an extended mid-'90s break notwithstanding, a-ha's international success has only continued, with more than a dozen UK Top 20 singles and a Guinness World Record for concert attendance in Rio.

The group's ninth studio album, Foot of the Mountain -- a partial return to a-ha's electronic roots -- was released abroad last year, while Rhino Records finally put out The Singles: 1984-2004 domestically and in June will make available deluxe expanded editions of Hunting and Scoundrel through its website.